America Struggles with Massive Influx of Illegal Immigrant Children

Editor’s Note: Instead of trying to reform our legal immigration system or enforce our current illegal immigration laws, our government has chosen to enable mass illegal immigration into the U.S. Suffering children is the result.

Federal officials were scrambling at the weekend to provide medical and other supplies to an emergency shelter in Arizona to help house a surge of illegal child immigrants into the country that President Barack Obama has called “an urgent humanitarian situation”.

More than 750 children from Central America spent the weekend in an unused warehouse in Nogales, Arizona, which the border patrol agency has turned into a temporary “way-station” for the children, a state official said.

The improvised shelter is one of the by-products of a jump in illegal immigration from Central America this year, including 47,000 children who entered the country on their own – almost double the number from the year before.

The difficulties in coping with such large numbers of unaccompanied children are stoking the already tortuous debates about reforming the country’s immigration system.

Jan Brewer, the conservative Republican governor of Arizona, described the conditions at the shelter in Nogales as “dire”. She urged people to ask the Obama administration “the reason for this massive influx of illegal crossings and the cost to taxpayers for having to deal with the crisis created by the President”.

Although the overall trend of illegal immigration has dropped in recent years, the authorities have been overwhelmed in recent months by the surge in children trying to cross the border. The federal government is establishing facilities at military bases in Texas and California to help house the children while their cases are being examined. The administration estimates that the influx of immigrant children could cost the federal government $2.28bn this year.